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Humankind Battles for Scrabble Supremacy

The day before they defended the honor of their species in Scrabble, Matt Graham and Joel Sherman convened for a final training session. Matt, who lives in a studio apartment in Manhattan crammed with dictionaries and word lists and Scrabble newsletters, went out to Joel's small house in the Bronx, which was crammed with the same stuff. The living room's decorative highlight was a Scrabble board showing the final game of last year's world championship, in which Joel defeated Matt.

The two sat down in Joel's kitchen at a computer much like the one they were about to play the next day. Deep Blue had already dethroned the human chess champion, occasioning great angst over the species' mental powers, but so far there had no been serious challenge in Scrabble. The match was being sponsored by The New York Times Magazine as part of the 50th anniversary of Scrabble's birth, in which The Times played a small role. Alfred Butts, the unemployed architect from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who developed the game, determined how many tiles of each letter to include (12 E's, 6 T's, 1 Q) by laboriously counting how often each letter appeared on the front page of The Times and other New York dailies.

Joel turned on a program called Video Flashcards, and the letters AEEGINRTS appeared on the screen. Joel immediately began typing GRATINEES (meaning to cook food with a crust). ''There's also AGENTRIES and RESEATING,'' he said. ''What else?''

''STINGAREE,'' Matt said, referring to an alternate name for the stingray fish. They moved on, coming up with most possibilities in seconds. When ADEEIRRST appeared, Matt broke it down instantly: ''ARTERIES, with a D left over. STEADIER, with an R. DREARIEST.'' They were briefly stumped by ACCEHOPUS, but within 20 seconds Joel saw CAPOUCHES.

''Some kind of hood or cowl,'' Matt replied, which was correct but also, of course, besides the point. At this level, you cannot get bogged down in definitions. Success requires the discipline to spend hours a day memorizing lists of playable words. It also helps if, like Matt and Joel, you are free from distractions like day jobs and marriage.

Joel, who is 36 and has been playing Scrabble since he was 6, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, dropped out of college, worked as a bank teller and then quit, partly because of health problems. (On the Scrabble circuit he's known as G.I. Joel due to his gastrointestinal ailments.) Full-time Scrabble is not a lucrative career -- last year Joel made $35,000 -- but he survives on a small inheritance and by living at home with his father and brother. ''I realize it seems crazy to spend so much time on the game,'' he says, ''but it happens to be the one thing I've found that I can do better than most other people.''

Matt, 32, who grew up in Indianapolis, dropped out of high school and came to New York to be a stand-up comic. He took up Scrabble only seven years ago, and plays on the circuit in between his appearances at comedy clubs and ''Late Night With Conan O'Brien.'' He does not do Scrabble jokes. There's not much overlap between his worlds. ''Comedy can be frustrating because it's so subjective,'' he says. ''The nice thing about Scrabble is that it's so clear-cut. It doesn't matter how the audience is feeling. It doesn't matter if you're not a brainiac with a degree from the right school. If you score higher, you win.''

Like most top players on the Scrabble tournament circuit, both Matt and Joel know perhaps 80,000 playable words, at least twice as many as the average person. But the guys' silicon opponent, a computer program named Maven, knows the entire dictionary -- 100,000 words of eight letters or less -- and can unscramble 5,000 anagrams in a second. Maven did not have to train the day before the match. The words were all securely imbedded in its memory, in a CD-ROM available in stores for $29.95.

Maven was created by Brian Sheppard, who started dabbling with the program in 1983 during an internship at I.B.M.'s research center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., home of the Deep Blue chess program. He began by programming Maven to quickly find every word that could be played each turn, grunt work that's easy for a computer. Then came the hard part: strategy.

The computer had to learn how to ''bingo,'' the key to championship play. Bingo is Scrabble slang for using all seven tiles in your rack on one turn, good for a 50-point bonus. Experts often get two or three bingos in a game by thinking ahead instead of just going for the highest score every turn. They unload clunky letters like U or Q or W and try to maintain a balanced mix of consonants and vowels that easily combine into seven-letter words. They also try to set up spots on the board for their bingos while not leaving too many openings for the opponent.

Humans use intuition and experience to make these decisions. Maven relies instead on formulas that Sheppard developed by letting the computer play millions of games. These formulas can leave Maven blind to obvious dangers ahead -- it sometimes makes needlessly ''volatile'' plays, as they are called, that leave high-scoring openings for the opponent. But although Maven had lost a previous confrontation with humanity -- a brief two-game contest at a scientific conference last year -- Sheppard was confident that it would win the full best-of-11 match at The Times.

''I can almost guarantee you that Maven will play better than Matt and Joel,'' said Sheppard, who now works for Hasbro, the toy company that sells the Scrabble CD-ROM with the Maven program. ''There are some situations in which they'll see something that Maven misses. But it will never get fatigued or miss a bingo.''

Matt, the brash, impetuous member of the odd couple, refused to believe he was an underdog. ''We have a slight edge,'' he said. ''This omnipotent, all-seeing machine still makes the stupidest blunders.''

Joel was more restrained, in keeping with his mild-mannered approach to Scrabble and life. ''We're no better than evenly matched with Maven,'' he said. ''The computer will make mistakes, but it has perfect word knowledge. There's just so much the human mind is capable of processing.''

Man met machine on the top floor of the Times building during a seven-hour match. Playing jointly with one rack of tiles, Matt and Joel sat across a table from a Toshiba laptop loaded with Maven. John D. Williams Jr., the executive director of the National Scrabble Association, acted as referee, and before long he was hearing complaints that the computer was cheating. These were not unexpected, given one of Maven's idiosyncrasies: it picks the tiles for both players. Sheppard says most players prefer to have Maven handle tile-drawing chores, but some of the top players don't like it, and it was easy to understand Matt and Joel's suspicion as the first game started. Cursed with bad tiles, they were reduced to playing paltry words like BAN, while Maven demolished them with GROSZY (Polish coins) and DICKIEST (British slang for faultiest).

''Look, we know to play GROSZY and DICKIEST, too,'' Matt said after the game. ''But we're working with bad racks, and it always seems to be that way with Maven. How can you not be suspicious of a machine that won't let you pick the tiles?''

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Humanity's tiles improved the next game, which Matt and Joel won with help from three bingos (UPHEAVE, STEWPAN and MISEATEN). They lost the third game, and then got another bad break at the start of the fourth. Matt and Joel drew EEIJTVW and knew immediately what the best play was: JEW, which is legal in tournament play as a lower-case verb. (The noun JEW is illegal because it's capitalized.)

Maven, however, would not allow JEW. More precisely, the corporate marketers of Maven would not allow it. Five years ago, a woman who was playing Scrabble with a Holocaust survivor came across the word in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and complained, and before long Hasbro was confronted with protests from the Anti-Defamation League. The leading Scrabble players, many of whom are Jewish, united in defense of free speech (and higher scores), but the controversy escalated. Besides protests about various slurs, there were letters from sensitive censors like the one who wrote, ''I personally find the most offensive words in the English language to be WAR and GUN.'' Hasbro responded by expurgating JEW and dozens of other objectionable words.

So Matt and Joel settled for playing VIEW, which left them stuck with the J for another turn. They fell behind and never caught up. ''Maybe we would have lost anyway,'' Joel said afterward. ''But JEW might have made a big difference.''

Maven had its bad moments, too, blowing the next game by leaving an opening for Matt and Joel -- a gaffe no human expert would have committed. (See Diagram 2.) Then, having cut Maven's lead in games to 3-2, Matt and Joel blundered (and eventually lost the game) by trying to play ZYMIC. Joel assured Matt it was a word -- a derivation of ZYME, a fermenting agent -- but the computer knew better, and they lost the turn.

''You said you were definitely sure it was a word,'' Matt said testily.

''I was definite,'' Joel replied. ''I can be definite and still be wrong. That's a human quality.''

The strain on the humans was starting to show. During the next game, they had a long argument over whether to play PIQUE or PIQUET (a card game), and then slumped in disgust when Maven pulled out a victory with a dramatic bingo. (See Diagram 3.) They were now behind 5-2, a game away from defeat. Near the end of the eighth game they were narrowly ahead and about to play a rack containing a blank and DIMTUU. The computer, which was being asked on each turn how it would play the humans' rack, instantly saw a bingo -- TRIDUUMS, three-day periods of Catholic prayers -- and flashed its recommendation on a screen visible to a small audience of fans but not to Matt and Joel. It took them more than a minute to find the word, and even then they weren't sure it was legitimate.

''TRIDUUM is definitely a word,'' said Joel. ''But is TRIDUUMS the right plural?''

It has to be right, Matt said. If the plural were TRIDUA, we'd know that word, and we don't. Let's do it. I want to bingo in style. I want to show this inanimate object a thing or two. Matt started to put out the tiles for TRIDUUMS, and the audience relaxed: humanity had not been bested by the computer on this turn.

But then came an even more splendid moment for the species. Joel suddenly spotted an intricate danger beyond Maven's comprehension. At this point, there were only six tiles left to be drawn from the pool, and if the humans played TRIDUUMS they would draw all six. With no tiles left in the pool, Maven could end the game during its next turn by playing a bingo, and the humans would be penalized for the tiles left in their rack, which would cost them the game. So Matt and Joel instead played MU (the Greek letter). Sure enough, Maven bingoed on the next turn with ORNITHES (bird varieties) and had to draw the final tiles from the pool. Then Matt and Joel played a bingo, SITUATED, to win the game. If they had thought like Maven and played TRIDUUMS, they would have lost.

Unfortunately for humanity, that was the high point. Maven got better tiles the next game, and the frustrated humans made one elementary mistake. (See Diagram 4.) They also got into a screaming argument over the relative merits of ENTASIA (muscle spasms) versus TAENIAS (Greek headbands). The dispute was so intense that Joel, who normally expresses displeasure by saying, ''Oh, crud!'' uttered one of the obscenities banned from the new Scrabble dictionary. At the end, when the guys' only chance to win was to play a bingo, Maven sealed its victory by dealing them a rack consisting of BGJNRVY.

The final score was 6 games to 3, which was not a fair representation of humanity's relative skill. The humans made a few minor mistakes, but on most turns they chose the same play recommended by Maven -- and sometimes a better one. ''All this proved was that Maven could give itself better tiles,'' Matt said. ''With even tiles, I think we'd have an edge.'' Joel still thought they were at best equal to Maven.

Sheppard was impressed at how well the humans had played, and he conceded that the computer's lopsided win had been due to better tiles. Both sides agreed that humans and Maven are closely matched -- but only for now. Sheppard has a powerful new version of Maven, which he hopes to release next year, that analyzes the possible responses by the opponent to each move under consideration. With this extra oomph, Maven is expected to become the undisputed champion.

''Maven will never have our intuitive feel for a board position,'' Joel said, ''but the new Maven will be able to do so many computations that it will probably be unbeatable.''

It may seem sad that the most popular human word game is being conquered by a machine, but no matter how good Maven gets at analyzing permutations of letters, it will remain incapable of the verbal skills that Matt and Joel displayed during the dinner after the match. For dessert they ordered TIRAMISU, a bingo word that Maven had played for its come-from-behind victory in the seventh game. ''That was the last straw, Maven giving itself that bingo,'' Matt said. ''You know what I felt ready for at that moment? TIRAMISU plus NA.''